


on her behalf

by reconvenings



Category: IT (Movies - Muschietti), IT - Stephen King
Genre: Blow Jobs, Cruising, Eddie Kaspbrak Cheats on Myra Kaspbrak, Hand Jobs, Infidelity, M/M, Semi-Public Sex, eddie also cucks myra, i guess richie cucks myra, meeting between canon, mini golf, richie is myra's celebrity crush, she's offscreen the whole time, sorry they forgot
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-27
Updated: 2020-12-27
Packaged: 2021-03-11 05:34:01
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 9,815
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28369932
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/reconvenings/pseuds/reconvenings
Summary: “She’s like, ‘oh Eddie, look at Richie Tozier, he’s so big and strong and handsome, I think he’d really treat me right,’ huh?”“Yeah, actually, so fuck you, man.”“If you insist,” says Richie.Or, Eddie Kaspbrak meets his wife’s celebrity crush.Or,hall pass fic, take one.
Relationships: Eddie Kaspbrak/Richie Tozier
Comments: 59
Kudos: 309





	on her behalf

**Author's Note:**

> riffing off [this](https://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/7jgboo/couples_often_joke_about_celebrities_on_their/) reddit post:
> 
> “I unexpectedly met my wifes celebrity-free-pass. He thought it was hilarious and agreed to have a beer with me so that I could send her a photo of us having beers together. Good guy.”
> 
> “And you did him on her behalf?”

There’s a guy over by the windmill structure who wants to suck Richie’s dick.

Well, that’s the working premise, anyway.

Here’s the set-up: The guy keeps looking over at Richie, looking away, looking back again. If there were prizes for edging, this guy would be on a podium, no question. He’s got big eyes that are doing things to Richie that usually take an entire appendage to eke out. It’s flipping the switches in his limbic system to hot and itchy and at least a third of the way hard. It’s making Richie’s whole torso, neck to dick, turn inside out. He’s going to be muscle and viscera splattered all over the 605. 

He’s hovering on the edge of recognizability on a good day, and today he’s hungover with a beanie and a pair of orange-tinted transition lenses on, so Richie estimates it’s 60/30/10 that this guy recognizes him, is judging him, or is checking him out. Well, none of those options are mutually exclusive, but it’s easier on Richie’s itty-bitty pea-brain if they don’t overlap.

Right now, Richie’s over by the big castle centerpiece, leaning against one of the peeled-paint turrets. Coming over here has been a bit of an experiment, since he will admit he stands out today, clunking around in a pair of baggy cargo shorts in the middle of the entire coterie of CoolSculpted SpikeTV execs circling around hole three — all sniffing the air for another taste of blood, waiting for the moment that they can take another big, chomping bite out from Richie’s left flank. 

At least one of them used to roadie for Phish and he wants to show off how chill and creative he still is, so hey, why don’t we take this meeting outside, have some fun with it, sound good, Rich? Sounds great, said Steve, and now they’re all here. At Golf N’ Stuff, Norwalk’s premier mini golf attraction. Where Richie’s being judged for not conforming to the heretofore-unknown dinner jacket dress code by some overgrown twink in a Men’s Wearhouse three-piece.

Not like anyone’s noticed. They basically stopped talking to him about twenty minutes ago, after Richie said, “Yeah I’m game for whatever” (leitmotif of his sorry excuse of a career) and Steve started babbling out numbers, which is usually Richie’s cue to check out and wander off to play Doodle Jump on his phone. Yeah. Steve has probably got it. 

Back to the guy. Who’s still staring at him, even after Richie’s cut himself off from the herd and the Where’s Waldo novelty of how he sticks out has to have worn off. He’s raising a wounded leg up on the savannah and here’s this coiled-up cheetah-ass motherfucker eyeing him like prey. 

The guy breaks off from his group and starts walking towards the bathroom, cutting Richie another quick glance and looking back down just as quickly.

He’s for sure being cruised. Right? Right. Richie’s been practicing positive thinking. It hasn’t worked so far, but that’s sort of the point, isn’t it? You keep doing it until, somehow, it does. 

Alright, only one way to find out.

The guy is washing his hands at the sink and he doesn’t even have his dick out yet.

“What’s up?” Richie says casually. 

He puts an elbow up on the hand dryer and leans one foot on top of the other. This is a pose inspired by the time he watched Shrek 2 with Steve’s kid, but apparently it’s a lot easier for an animated character to stand like that, because he overshoots it a little and has to slam his forearm down to stop himself from tipping too hard into the side of the dryer.

“Why the hell are you touching that?” says the guy, who’s turned around to stare at him. There’s a paper towel sandwiched between his palms. He’s got long, careful-looking fingers, which is perfect, because Richie’s got a long, careful-looking dick.

“Do you know how many germs those things can collect?”

That’s pretty rich coming from a guy soliciting stranger sex in the bathroom of the mini golf course from The Karate Kid.

The guy is still ranting about hand dryer bacteria — _You know they actually suck up bacteria and then it multiplies inside, like it creates a fucking colony, and then when you put your hands under it spews it all back out, so then you’ve got like 50 times the germs and now they’re all over your hands, which defeats the point, doesn’t it, dickwad_ — and he hasn’t even made a move to undo his belt buckle or to subtly walk over to the urinals where he could undo his belt buckle with plausible deniability.

Fine. Richie moves up his mental list to the second scenario. So he’ll go in reverse probability order. Richie’s never really been a math guy, and he’s never had a lick of self-preservation. “Um,” he interrupts, “Do you have a problem with me or something?”

The guy squints at him.

“Yeah, I do,” he gestures at Richie, scrunching the paper towel up in his hand. “Did you not hear me just now? Take your hand off the dryer.”

O-kay. Richie does what the guy says, even though it wasn’t like he was using the germy part of the dryer. His arm was on top, remember?

The guy chops his right hand to the side like a crossing guard. “Go wash your hands!” he yells.

Look, Richie’s not really that picky but the guy is pretty cute up close. Or, severely handsome is probably more accurate, although Richie imagines he’d qualify for cute if you knew him, once you’d gotten over the first-round shock of his marble-cut face, the deep, etched-in dimples and the stark, fountainhead nose. Richie’s starting to understand the Pygmalion brand of sexual perversion. This lost Bernini wants clean hands before he’ll touch a dick? That’s reasonable. Richie’s personal entry fee is considerably lower, but he’s not going to begrudge anyone else their own sexual hangups. Yes, he’s a hypocrite, but only where it counts.

The guy sweeps his arm out in front of the sink, as if Richie’s a horse that needs to be led to water (he is). Very “ta-da!” Very Deal Or No Deal. Call up Howie Mandel. Richie’s going to press the big button and make the effing deal.

He lets his shoulder brush against the other guy’s bicep as he steps around him. The guy jolts backwards. He drops eye contact for the first time since he whirled on Richie about germs and stumbles over to the trash can. Richie keeps his own gaze locked as the guy tosses his used paper towel in the trash, while Richie pumps soap into his palm and twists the faucet on one-handed. The guy turns around to look at him again and Richie glides his eyes back to his own front, trying to tamp down on a grin as he keeps watching through the glaze of the mirror. For some reason, he’s feeling a lot of deja vu here. All this looking and not looking and the lithe body at the other end. Must be the Ghost of Cruising Past or something.

The guy’s watching Richie wash his hands, which as far as kinks go, is a pretty tame one. Points for creativity, though, and now that he thinks about it, Richie can see the appeal. Good sex is a study in contrasts. It’s more satisfying to make things dirty when they start out so clean.

So Richie plays it up, just for him, soaping up each finger one by one. When he gets to his thumbs, he fists his opposite hand around each one and slides it up and down, jacking up the pace with each scrub. He’s doing a screen test here. Casting couch, eat your heart out.

The guy clears his throat. “Okay, great, um, see you later,” he says. Richie sees him kind of flail his wrists weakly in what’s either a wave goodbye or a gay little hand flap, and then he backs up out of the bathroom completely.

“Wait, hang on!” Richie shouts after him. He’s flipping the faucet closed and wiping his hands in streaking snail trails on his shirt.

“Why’d you leave?” he calls out, jogging to catch up with the guy. 

He flaps them a little by his sides to shake the last water droplets off. The guy’s stopped and watching him with a scrunched-up nose, and Richie has the pulsing, juvenile impulse to grip him by the shoulder, shake his hands under his nostrils, and screech _Smell my finger!_ scratchy and shrill into his ear.

“Why’d _you_ leave? You didn’t even use the bathroom,” the guy says, accusing. 

“I thought we were talking,” Richie frowns. He keeps his hands to himself.

“Talking? All I did was tell you to wash your hands,” the guy replies, furrowing his brow and throwing out a questioning get-a-load-of-this-guy palm. (Does he even have to say it? Yes. Of course he can get a load. Richie will gift-wrap it. Graciously.)

“Yeah, I mean, we were _talking_ ,” Richie says. He’s not whining. Really, he’s not. 

The guy looks at him blankly.

He tries again. “Why were you staring at me? Earlier.”

Finally, the guy has the decency to look embarrassed. Richie throws a hex towards his own IMDB page.

“You a fan?” Richie asks, sighing a little. Of course it’s just some straight-and-also-narrow dude who recognizes Richie from the time he co-hosted CATegory Is, the game show where people answer cat trivia while their cats try to do an obstacle course. It got canceled after two episodes but part of it went viral on eBaum’s World a few years back, because someone made a compilation of the three and a half pussy jokes Richie managed to get past the Meow Mix sponsors.

Jesus Christ, Richie really needs to get laid soon. He’s walking around so dick-dehydrated that he’s fantasizing about random business dudes at mini golf.

“No, actually,” says the guy. He sounds appalled. He sounds _aghast_. He probably sounds other things too, but Richie never made it past the A-words in his SAT vocab handbook. “My wife is.”

There goes the punchline. Not for the first time, Richie mourns the Lady Gaga powers-that-be. Of course he’d kill to be born _that_ way. Who wouldn’t? He’d be having so much more sex if he could get it up for whatever sort of lucky bitch put a ring on this medium drink of Muscle Milk, instead of chasing fruitlessly after people who don’t even know that the outer frontiers of the English language include sentences like “Horny GILF Sucks Ghost Stepgrandson’s Cock.”

“Your wife likes my comedy?” is what he says, because he’s not 21 anymore and this guy isn’t Jason at the Taco Bell team member holiday party telling Richie he doesn’t swing that way and then throwing up (supposedly unrelated) immediately after. Plus, this isn’t really the right venue for him to sprawl out on the floor, put on My Bloody Valentine, and cry.

“She must have great taste.” He says this part sarcastically, with the kind of tonal dryness that people only really pick up on when they already know you and your vocal baseline. Not like this guy that he’s talked to for all of five minutes by a putt-putt place’s shit stand is going to notice.

“Yeah,” the guy says, tilting his head like a baby bird and squinting at him, “She does actually, since she thinks it sucks. Which it does. We agree on that, to be clear.”

“She’s a fan who hates my comedy? How’s that work?”

The guy purses his mouth and shrugs. He’s staring resolutely at the ground like he wants to punch it hard enough to split it open. The next sentence comes out through his gritted teeth like a first, too-cold blast of A/C. “She thinks you’re hot.”

Richie has a deathwish, evidently, because there’s something about a guy that he thinks is hot saying the words “you’re hot” that really puts gas in his tank. Never mind the surrounding context. He’ll cherry pick; he has no shame. 

“So you were staring at me to make sure?” he asks, “What’s your verdict?”

“No, I was trying to decide if I should ask you for an autograph or something,” the guy says with a challenging jut of his chin. He looks Richie up and down in mock assessment. Richie tries his level best to stay still, even as his entire body threatens to shudder. He flexes his toes in his plastic souvenir shop slides and locks his shoulders back, standing ripe and willing at attention.

The guy scoffs and turns away. “But I decided against it.”

Oh yeah, Richie’s cherry sure is picked.

They’ve been walking down one of the concrete pathways this whole time, Richie lilting his body in the direction of this guy’s stiff, speed-walking spine. Now he’s stopping right in front of the window of the snack hut and pulling out his wallet. He turns back again and seems to startle, like he’s surprised that Richie is still behind him.

“Uh, I guess, do you want anything?” he asks, gesturing to the menu board above their heads.

“Yeah, let me get a hot dog,” Richie says without glancing up.

It’s harmless, at this point. He’s just trying to rile this guy up. They’re close enough now that he can see the wedding ring on his finger, the way it glints and catches on the setting December sun.

The guy coughs.

A teenager in a paper tri-corner hat appears at the window. “Can I help you?”

“Yeah, can I get a small Sprite and. And a hot dog?”

“Links at the links,” says Richie. He turns toward the cashier and adds, “Feel free to use that. I won’t even ask for royalties.”

Two pairs of eyes roll. Technically he can only see one pair, but he has to bet that the other one is tumble-drying too, or you’ll have to call him a bad judge of character. “Yeah, you got it,” says the mouth in front of him. From behind him, the hot guy hands over a fiver.

Richie turns to him again. He’s not looking back, and it feels deliberate, the way he’s got his eyes trained diligently on the menu board. There’s no way it takes that long to read BURGR FRIES HOT DOG NACHO SOFTDRINKS.

He reaches over the guy’s shoulder to root around in one of the plastic trays with pencils and scorecards in it. It brings their chests close to each other and Richie hears a sharp intake of breath.

It pricks right into the fleshy shell of Richie’s gut. Shot of adrenaline. Tip of a knife.

It’s interesting, is what it is.

“What’s your wife’s name?” Richie asks, brandishing the tiny golf pencil with an exaggerated flourish.

The guy hesitates a beat too long. “Myra,” he says.

“M-Y-R-A?” Richie repeats back, and the guy nods at him slowly, pursing his lips.

“And what’s yours?”

“Eddie,” he says. Richie rolls the name around in his head like a marble in a plastic dish. It rattles alongside the rim. Surely he’s met an Eddie before. An Edwin? An Edward, at the very least. Maybe one of his mom’s old coworkers? A boom operator on a set? Maybe there was another guy, one he picked up at a park, who called himself Eddie too. Must be that. Since Richie’s thinking nonsensically about pavilions.

“E-D-D-I-E?” he drawls.

“Yeah, is there another way to spell Eddie?” Eddie says, bristling.

“Could be E-D-D-Y,” says Richie.

“No it couldn’t,” says Eddie, “That’s not a person name. That’s the word for a current. Water. Not people.”

“Don’t be name-prescriptive,” tsks Richie, “What are you, the French Academy? There’s people out there named Apple, and you think you can’t be Eddie with a Y?”

It’s so fucking tragic that he won’t get to hook up with this crochety piece of work that’s pinging all the carefully cultivated horndog parts of his brain. It’s something spiky and antsy that’s pushing him bodily towards this man. Just hearing him talk is churning something low in his belly, orienting his toes towards those shiny loafered feet. Richie’s a notorious self-sabotager, though, so it’s the _straight_ and _married_ that’s probably doing it for him too — after all, it’s so much less damning when you want things you’ll never even get to have.

“Hot dog and a Sprite?” the snack hut kid calls out. Eddie twists backwards to receive his order and Richie takes the opportunity to write on the back of the slip of paper, “To Mr. and Mrs. Myra and Eddie, Love, Richie Tozier.” Then he draws an upright dick-and-balls right in the middle of the page. That’s from day one of media training. Stay on brand for the fans.

“Here,” says Eddie, pushing the cardboard sleeve with the hot dog in it down the counter in front of Richie. He slides over the squeeze bottles of ketchup but holds the mustard at bay. That works out great for Richie, who’s always hated mustard.

“Grassy-ass,” Richie says. He reaches over to tuck the autographed paper into the front of Eddie’s ugly suit jacket, the tips of his fingers dipping shallowly into the pocket. Eddie, who’s the kind of guy that visibly vibrates, suddenly stills. Richie retracts his hand, but not before he claps it once over the fabric panel. There’s some kind of pectoral structure back there. So that’s nice. Useful information for when he’s, inevitably, alone again in bed. Richie steals a glance up at Eddie’s face. His eyes are big and saucering. Starstruck, maybe. Richie feels like a bird caught in the crosshairs of a pair of binoculars.

“Autograph for the missus,” Richie mumbles.

He takes the red bottle and splurts it over the dog. The frank? Don’t think about the word _weiner_ right now, Richie. _Sausage_ is pushing it. Fuck, too late.

Richie screws open his mouth and slides one end of the hot dog into the resultant “O.” He leaves it there, not quite suckling at it, perhaps even ever-so-subtly hollowing out his cheeks.

“Do you not know how to fucking eat?” Eddie screeches. Richie just waggles his eyebrows and widens his mouth so that he can push in more of the bun.

“Bite it! What the fuck!”

Richie winks (he’s very bad at winking, so he can’t say for sure if it’s successful) and clamps down his top teeth.

“So. Your wife’s into me,” he says next, tongue and teeth still working around bread-tomato-meat. “How’s that make you feel?”

Eddie’s got his mouth poised right over the straw of his cup of soda. He looks like a biter. Richie watches him suck down and lift off. If he squints a little, he thinks he can see where spit’s collected at the straw’s flattened, abused tip.

“It’s fucking annoying, she watches your specials all the time,” he says.

“Oh shit, am I ruining your marriage?”

Eddie twists the ring on his finger and turns the corners of his pretty pink mouth down.

“You’re not,” he says, emphasis telling and just loud enough that Richie hears it, internalizes it, packs it a nice, nutritious lunch before he sends it off to school.

Eddie sucks up the last of his soda with a rolling, creaky slurp. Then he snaps open the plastic lid and pours some of the leftover crushed ice into his mouth. The entire production is borderline concerning, and Richie is obsessed with it.

Eddie crumples the cardboard part of the cup in his hand and makes toward the course again. Richie goes after him, River Phoenix to his blazing Keanu Reeves.

“You’re her hall pass, actually,” Eddie says, and then immediately clams up as if he didn’t intend to say it.

Richie lifts his eyebrows as high as he can get them and waits.

“You know, a celebrity hall pass? Free pass, whatever the term is,” Eddie explains reluctantly with another sweep of his hand.

“So, like, if she met me, and we fucked,” Richie says, “It wouldn’t be cheating?”

“Uh,” Eddie says, “I guess. Not that that’s in the pre-nup.”

“Oh, you didn’t add a Richie Tozier sex kitten clause?” he asks. He tosses a hand out with the tips of his fingers bent into a queeny claw.

“No,” says Eddie, “Sex kitten? You’re more like a, um - a sex gorilla.”

“Eddie, man, I don’t think that’s the insult you were going for.”

Eddie stumbles forward a little and Richie nearly turns his next step into a skip. “Why don’t you call her up?” he bluffs. “Bring her around, let her take me for a ride.” 

“She wouldn’t -” Eddie starts. Richie watches in fascination as he squeezes his eyes and fists shut. “She’s not here. We live in New York,” he says with a groan, and that “we” burns more than Richie would like. Eddie opens his eyes gestures back towards the course at his own besuited posse. “I’m on a business trip.”

“Oh,” says Richie, “Well, how do you like LA so far?”

Eddie snorts. “It’s fine. I met a celebrity, can you believe it.”

He stops by the rack of golf clubs organized by height. He picks out one from the middle cubbies, then takes a slightly taller one from an adjacent cubby and passes it to Richie.

“Me, right?” Richie says, “You’re talking about me?”

“No,” says Eddie, a touch too gleeful. “We saw Nic Cage at Benihana.” He turns away and starts towards the course again.

“Wait, wait, one more question,” Richie calls out, jogging up to Eddie’s side once again. Eddie sighs huffily, but he does stop and turn his head towards Richie expectantly.

“Who’s your hall pass?” he asks.

Eddie screws his face up. He looks like Sam Eagle, all disgruntled and beaky. Which, don’t get Richie wrong, is very hot. Richie’s always thought of himself as a patriot. “I don’t have one,” Eddie says.

“Your wife gets a hall pass and you don’t? Isn’t that sexist?”

“That’s not how sexism works. But obviously you wouldn’t know that. Anyways, why are you still talking to me? Don’t you have a girlfriend to cheat on or something? Or whatever stupid shit you do with your life.”

“Yeah, you wanna come with?”

Eddie’s nostrils flare. “I don’t want to have sex with other women,” he says, as if that answers Richie’s question. Well, maybe it does, but he doesn’t think Eddie knows that yet.

“Just women?” Richie asks, thrumming. “How about sex with people who aren’t women?” He takes a breath and just goes for it. It’s like riding a bike down a too-steep hill and waiting at the last second to lift your hands. If you’re going to crash, at least do it trying something daring. “Like, say, I don’t know, men?

Eddie flushes _bright_ red.

Oh. _Something_ is going on here. Richie is going to chase it down and tackle it and hold it against the ground until it taps at the floor and gasps “uncle.”

He doesn’t actually end up bothering Eddie again for an entire twenty minutes. He missed three holes with his little snack-chasing excursion, so he makes them up on his own, diligently recording his swings on his flimsy scorecard and chatting briefly with some 12-year-old kid who’s here with his mom after getting his braces tightened at the ortho office across the freeway.

“My dad’s a dentist,” he says to the kid.

“Ew,” says the kid.

“Yeah,” says Richie, “Ew is right.”

“Nice form,” Richie says, sidling up to Eddie again. Richie’s not lying. He’s got good lines. Like a dolphin. His ass is stuck out a bit as he’s leaning down with his hand wrapped around the grip of the golf club. No offense, but it’s not really logical for a man wearing pants that tight to be married to a woman.

“She’s like, ‘oh Eddie, look at Richie Tozier, he’s so big and strong and handsome, I think he’d really treat me right,’ huh?”

“Yeah actually, so fuck you, man,” 

“If you insist,” says Richie.

“Stop doing that,” Eddie snaps. 

“Doing what?”

“Joking about being gay, asshat.”

“Who says I’m joking?” He says it too fast, like a reflex, which is why it doesn’t land the way he means it to. _Inhabit the character_. That’s what he learned at the Actors Workshop class Stanley Tucci gave him a coupon for once. And the LA Times still calls his filmography “dubious.”

“It’s not fucking funny,” Eddie scolds, “I know I shouldn’t expect better from some piss-poor jester who had, what, two lines in _I Now Pronounce You Chuck and Larry_ , but I thought it was cool for you lib actors to at least pretend to hate on Prop 8.”

“I asked to do the NOH8 campaign and they told me not to bother,” Richie says.

“I bet,” Eddie sneers.

This is sounding like a conversation Richie has in the mirror with himself on a bimonthly basis. Those never go any farther than his liquor cabinet, so Richie figures he should cut himself off early here. He changes the subject laterally.

“She into roleplay? Your wife, I mean.” 

Eddie seems to be resigned to the fact that Richie’s not going to leave him alone.

“I bought a pair of glasses like yours for our anniversary,” he says, throwing it out there like he expects Richie to have an equally conversational response to that.

“Not those,” he adds, pointing to Richie’s glasses, “The ones you wear at shows.” He’s reddening again, and Richie’s thinking about him having sex with his _wife_ while he’s dressed up as _Richie._ He should call his therapist. He hasn’t seen her in months, but this is an emergency. He might have a confusing new sexual disorder to add to the docket.

Eddie lays a hand, thumb and four fingers extended in a skate-ramp vee, over his eyes in embarrassment and Richie finds he misses their beautiful baleful pools with an acute diagnosis of agony. “And she did make me quote you once.”

“Holy shit,” says Richie. “Which line? What’d you say?”

Eddie dips his head, muttering something low under his breath and looking shiftily away.

“What? I didn’t hear you.”

Eddie rolls his eyes into whites and uses three of his fingers to push up the sagging lines on his forehead like it physically pains him to answer. “The fun’s just beginning,” he says, on the wing of a long-suffering sigh.

“Who’s the guy?” asks Steve.

“Who?” says Richie, doing a shit job of feigning ignorance.

“The guy you keep talking to,” says Steve, eyes narrowing. 

“Oh, just an old friend,” he lies, “Crazy that we ran into each other here, huh?”

Steve doesn’t believe him, because it’s Steve’s job not to believe him. Fortunately, it’s also Steve’s job to mind his own business.

“Harder, Eddie, harder,” Richie cries, shifting his voice into falsetto and pumping his hips forward as he rocks his golf club back and forth against the ground with the heel of his hand. “And you say,” Richie leads, shooting out a finger gun, index finger pointed forward. Tiny flag with “BANG” printed on it. He mouths the line at Eddie, who’s glowering back, mouth pressed into a flat plane.

No worries. “Oh, _My_ ra, the fun’s _just_ beginn _ing_ ,” Richie crows, something close to iambic pentameter. It’s Richie’s line anyway.

“Wow,” says Eddie. He’s golf-clapping, with his hands half-cupped, four fingers of the left slotting into the sweet curve between his right thumb and index. He’s doing it slow, dry, leveling Richie with a look that’s absolutely _skipping_ down Richie’s shaft.

“Thank you, thank you very much,” Richie says, bowing with one hand at his waist and the other stretched out behind his back.

“I don’t know why you’re taking credit,” Eddie says accusingly, “I’m 90% sure you don’t even write your own material.”

“How do you know that?”

“I don’t,” Eddie says. “You just look fucking stupid saying it. Like, it doesn’t sound right coming out of your mouth.”

Richie hums placidly. “Yeah, there’s definitely something wrong if I’m coming out of my mouth,” he notes.

This might be the most fun Richie’s had in months. It’s probably some of his best material in years. He should get Steve to see if they have writing spots open at Sean Cody.

Eddie’s nostrils flare in some microexpression of disgust. “That’s fucking disgusting, why would you even say that? Do you ever, like, bleep yourself?”

“No,” Richie replies, “Why would I?”

At hole fourteen, he waits until he makes eye contact with Eddie across the course to dip the head of his golf club in and out of the mouth of the big clown head.

“Hole-in-one!” Richie cheers after Eddie’s ball rolls up the ramp of the frog tongue and through its mouth. He’s been sitting on one of the metal posts separating the putting area from the decorative greenery, waiting for Eddie to get here.

“Actually it was par,” glancing at Richie as he reaches down and extracts the _ball_ from the _hole_.

Really, can anyone blame Richie for being this horny right now? It’s mini golf.

“Is there even par in mini golf?”

“Yeah, do you know how to read? It’s on the scorecard.”

“So what exactly does your wife like about me?” Richie asks. “What is it that gets her to set out the ol’ slip-n-slide? How’d I get hired as the captain of her pleasure cruise?”

“I wouldn’t know,” Eddie replies darkly.

“Your devoted, long-suffering wife waxes poetic about me in your marital bed, and you just tune it out? Didn’t you just lecture me about homophobia? You one of those guys who can’t visually process another man ‘cause it trips out your masculinity wires?”

“Two years,” Eddie squeaks. He’s got his mouth turned down again and he’s clenching his left hand by his side. “It’s only been two years.” 

Richie squints at him quizzically. 

Eddie clears his throat and explains, “I’ve only been married two years. So. Not long-suffering, really.” That’s his ring hand, Richie realizes.

Richie has no idea how marriage works. About two-thirds of LA County is divorced, so honestly, it probably doesn’t. Supposedly, his parents have a good marriage, but it’s not like he’s ever seen them so much as hold hands. Marriage, he’s pretty sure, is just having someone to send to the grocery store and refinance your house with.

“Cool,” says Richie.

“Anyway, I’m not homophobic. I’m - and, I’m secure in my masculinity. You’re, you know, you’re tall. She’s into that.”

“Uh-huh, sure am,” Richie says. He puffs out his chest and stretches his arms up, wiggling his fingers at the top. Eddie’s eyes drop down somewhere near his midsection, almost too quick to catch. But Richie’s got a lot riding on his ability to pay attention right now, so you can bet it lands right in the center of his mitt. “What else?” he asks, sucking in his cheeks so that he doesn’t betray his invading grin.

“Arms,” says Eddie.

“Just. Arms?” Richie says, folding his hands together on top of his head and fanning his bent elbows out.

“Uh-huh.”

Richie smirks.

“She says she could, I guess, lay her head down on your chest.” Eddie shoots a look right at Richie’s chest when he says that, like he’s considering the concept. If Richie could do the thing where you jiggle your pecs, he absolutely would.

“She can’t on yours?”

“I have asthma,” says Eddie.

“No you don’t,” Richie says without thinking. 

“What?” says Eddie, “Of course I do, how the fuck would you know I didn’t?”

“I don’t know,” Richie replies. He really doesn’t. But now he has to commit to it, because Eddie’s even more pissed off about it and he wants to see what other curse words he’ll deign to bestow. “Just had a feeling.”

“What the fuck, shitbrains, you walk around questioning people’s medical histories? You see someone having a heart attack and you’re just like, eh, don’t worry, he’s faking it? That’s malpractice, or, fucking, bad samaritanship, you sociopath.”

Richie hits his own chest with the end of a fist. “Ouch, right in the heart, doc. I miss when you were complimenting me. Just one more, for the road?”

“Fine,” says Eddie, “You have a nice smile.”

Richie smiles at him, toothily, like a shark.

“What’s so wrong with you that she’s fantasizing about _me_?” Richie asks him as he passes Eddie’s group one last time. He’s trailing the Daniel Plainview deal-making going on between Steve and Dustin and Devon and all the other Junior VPs of Talent Ass-kiss-ition. Richie doesn’t really care. Steve said they were close to “working something out” and that Richie has free rein to “fuck off or fuck or whatever the fuck you need to do, just be at my office tomorrow at 9 to sign the papers.” 

So now Richie’s got two golf balls in his right hand, swirling them around. They should hang a new tagline on this place, after the comedic cobalt he’s been able to mine out of here today. Golf ‘N Stuff: The Napa Valley of Innuendo.

“Nothing,” Eddie says, pushing his bottom lip out. His golf ball’s gotten stuck in a corner and he’s been pinging it between two of the obstacle blocks on this stretch of green, growing visibly more frustrated as the ball knocks back and forth. Richie taps it out of the junction with the flat front of his shoe. Eddie looks around quickly and, satisfied that no one else saw, takes another swing.

“Nothing? You’ve got quite an ego there, Edrick.”

“No, look, my wife and I, we have a very secure marriage. We’re - we have a lot of things in common. We have compatible interests, and life goals. Alright? We’re very happy together,” Eddie says. The last line rings out decisively, like he’s closing a sales pitch. Richie did the Alec Baldwin Glengarry Glenn Ross monologue for an audition tape once. So he knows his stuff. _Attention, interest, decision, action._ Check, check, check, and he’s working on it.

“Are you jealous of me?”

“No,” Eddie says acidly.

“C’mon, your wife is walking around saying she wants to have sex with a schlubby gross-out comedian and you’re, what, you’re cool with it?”

“It’s healthy and normal to have sexual fantasies,” Eddie says stiffly.

“Agreed. Got any you’d like to share?”

“Yeah, I’m fantasizing about you shutting the fuck up.”

“If that’s what gets you going,” Richie says. He lays a finger on his chin and careens his head to the left. “Wait, are you actually into it? Like your wife being hot for me gets you hot too? What’s the word for that?”

“Cuckold,” says Eddie.

“Oh, so it is your thing?”

“What?” says Eddie. “No!” he exclaims, “I don’t want you to fuck her.” He says that way too loud, and this family of four nearby turns around and glares. Eddie glares back. 

“Okay,” says Richie, easy and easy for it, “Who do you want me to fuck?”

Eddie gives him the finger, the wordless incantation for “fuck you.” Richie will take it.

“So I was thinking,” Richie says to him later as he’s fishing a golf ball out from under a drawbridge. He’s on his hands and knees for this one, which is just an incredible image, Eddie’s a genius for putting that out into the world. Regardless of how this shakes out, Richie can definitely whip it to the idea of fucking a guy — could be any guy, doesn’t have to be this one — kneeling in front of him at hole six later tonight.

Eddie stands up. He levels Richie with a prissy sort of look and crosses his arms across his chest. Shit. Scratch that. It’s for sure going to be this guy. Squeeze him all out and pour his juices into a popsicle mold. Richie wants to _lick_ him.

“This is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. And it’s a real shame that your wife’s not here to take advantage of it.” He puts some extra emphasis on “advantage” and leans forward into Eddie’s personal space. Eddie kind of vibrates at that, but he steps closer, as if on instinct. Fucking, like, animal magnetism.

Richie is definitely going to hell for this.

“But maybe you should,” he keeps going, because he’s suffering a cerebral hemorrhage and he’s got gray matter leaking out of his ears onto the spiny Astroturf below, “You know, on her behalf.”

“I don’t follow,” says Eddie, polite as can be. He’s got his brow furrowed and this hot little pout that Richie wants to feel against the underside of his dick. 

Wow. They’re clearing a spot on the gallows for Richie as he speaks.

“Uh,” he tries again. Well, no one has ever accused him of being a quitter. “Are hall passes transferable?”

Eddie’s eyes widen.

“What I’m thinking is,” Richie keeps going, because he’s always running his mouth, running headlong, digging a hole, digging his heels, “You don’t have a hall pass, but your wife does, ergo, tit for tat, checkmate, eye for an eye.” He’s blabbering, he’s joking, he’s always joking, hey man, it was just a joke, I’m not like, gay _gay_ , unless you’re offering? Hey, okay, I’m not gonna pass up a nut.

“Who says I need one,” Eddie says, and he’s looking low, too low, on Richie’s face. Richie’s mouth suddenly feels like it’s hanging loose, drooping halfway down his chin. He sucks in his lips to try to keep it from leaping clean off his face.

He scratches at his too-long stubble self-consciously. Eddie’s eyes trace the movement. “You tell me, Eddie,” he murmurs, “Do you?”

“Hey Edward!” someone calls. Richie swivels until he spots one of Eddie’s golfing group — his coworkers, he realizes, and then he realizes he hasn’t given them a single thought since he started tailing Eddie and yapping endlessly at his heels. This new guy’s got a too-big suit jacket on too, but the checkered shirt he’s got on underneath has come untucked from his slacks. It flaps around his waist as he jogs to catch up with them.

“Has this dude been bothering you?” he asks, once he’s gotten up to them. He’s looking at Richie suspiciously with this froggy crinkle to his mouth. Richie is clearly swimming in an untenable hormonal haze right now, because even this patchy ginger beard with baby-face frat-boy cheeks is materializing his way into the starring-Eddie fantasy that’s been swirling around in the back of his head for the past hour and some change. Besides, there’s something about him standing next to a redhead in aviators that feels significant.

“No, it’s uh, college. We went to college. Together. We’re just, um, catching up,” Eddie finishes lamely.

“Oh, whoa! Well, hey, nice to meet you, man. Kenny Donovan,” his coworker says, sticking a hand out for Richie to shake.

For the record, Richie hates handshakes. Something about the sweaty impersonality of them. Close and not close enough. If we have to touch, let’s go all the way. Let me grip the bank of your shoulders, clutch the swell of your calf, nest at the crest of your left ear. Fuck business. If he can’t take pleasure, he’ll take a whole lot of nothing at all.

“You guys just ran into each other here? That’s kismet, man. So cool,” Kenny says. He beams at Eddie like an eager puppy. It makes him look really dumb and dopey and Richie’s feeling sour about it. “Well, we’re gonna head back to the conference center, but if you wanted to stay and catch up with your buddy, I don’t think anyone will mind.”

“Trevor is giving a talk on actuarial ethics. What a pill, right?” he continues, waving back at his group. He fakes a yawn and then collapses his hand into a fist that he uses to yank at an imaginary noose, rolling his eyes and sticking his tongue out. “You can defo skip that.”

Eddie laughs and it sounds vacant, like the shape of a laugh where a real emotion would be. “Sounds good, Ken. Appreciate it,” in this jock-y robot voice.

Richie needs help, stat, because now he’s picturing Eddie saying that while he comes.

“Alright, champ,” Kenny says, clasping a hand on Eddie’s shoulder, “See you back at the hotel.” 

They watch Kenny lope away with his golf club flung over his shoulder. He swings his club through the air like a baseball bat as Eddie’s other coworkers cackle and yell “STEEE-RIKE!”

“That’s my manager,” Eddie says.

“Yeah, of course it is,” Richie replies.

Speaking of bases. Speaking of pitching.

Richie turns back to face Eddie, looking him up and down for maybe the tenth time today. Call him a romantic, but he thinks the view gets better every time. 

The tops of Eddie’s cheeks shade in, but he doesn’t duck his head away. Richie drinks it up like a Victorian suitor. 

“So you want to stick around, catch up? Reminisce about that wild kegger at Kappa Upsilon Mu?”

“Cum is spelled with a C,” Eddie says, frowning.

“There’s no Cs in the Greek alphabet,” says Richie, “Which you would know if you ever went to class instead of fooling around with your friends, slugger.”

“We’re not friends.”

“We could be,” says Richie. That begs a question that Richie doesn’t vocalize. He’s being obvious enough as it is.

But Eddie’s still giving frankly scary eye contact, and isn’t that answer enough? “Sorry, I just thought you’d appreciate not getting offered a spot as tonight’s conference entertainment.”

“No, that sounds like a lot of work. I can only really entertain one person at a time,” Richie says. “I get good reviews, though,” he adds, sweeping his tongue across his teeth and flicking his eyes back down Eddie’s face. Last call. Go big or go home. Pitch yourself feet first off the cliff, pray you land in still waters below.

Two worst cases. One, he’ll get arrested for public indecency. Two, decked by this slim-fit G.I. Joe action figure. Either way, he’ll get someone’s hands heavy on his skin and maybe that’s all that he ever wants.

Eddie turns around and walks away.

Worser case, then. Strike. Strike. Strike. Richie’s out. 

“Hey!” someone shouts. Richie looks up. It’s Eddie. He’s got his arms posed up in a wingspan-wide W, Lady Justice with her scales. He’s looking at Richie like he’s an idiot. He turns on his heel and marches forward again.

Richie springs up like a Doberman and follows.

*

They’re back where they met. More romance. Richie will give a toast about this beautiful tiled bathroom and its neon mood lighting at the civil union ceremony. Hah. “I’m just wondering,” he says magnanimously, “What would your wife do to me if she was here?”

“Hopefully shank you and put us all out of our misery,” Eddie mutters.

“If you can roleplay as me, I bet you could roleplay as your wife,” Richie says.

Eddie glowers at him.

He points at the sink again. Thankfully, Richie knows the routine. He scrubs up again (workmanlike, they’ve already had enough foreplay) over his knuckles, under his joints. He wipes his hands on a brown paper towel and presents himself to Eddie expectantly.

Subtext — please, dear God, please — meet text.

Eddie fits a hand against Richie’s sternum and _pushes._ Richie lets himself fall into the give. 

Richie’s shoulder blades are levering open the stall door, and the next thing he knows they’re all alone and heaving at each other in a 5x3 open-ended box with a toilet inside of it.

Eddie’s staring at him (again! again! again!), pushing short, hard breaths out of his mouth. His hand is still on Richie’s chest, palm landing in the recessed male cleavage just to the right of Richie’s pounding heartbeat.

“Have you done this before?” he asks. He’s coughing it up clammy and awkward from the roof of his mouth.

“What, accost my wife’s celebrity crush?”

“Been with a man.”

Eddie pauses, but he nods. The bobblehead of Richie’s dreams.

“Cheated on your wife?”

Now he bites his lip and drops his gaze. “Thought you said it wasn’t exactly cheating.”

“Oh, so then I’m your first?”

“I haven’t decided yet,” Eddie replies, but he’s looking at him again. He takes his hand off of Richie’s chest.

“No, wait, it’s not, you’re right, it doesn’t count -” he says frantically, patting at the air between them.

“Do you have a condom?” Eddie says, cutting him off.

“Yeah, yeah,” says Richie, fumbling into one of the pockets below his knee for his wallet. Finally, he shakes it out and holds up a foil-wrapped packet. 

Now they’re both just staring at that, like the XL XL XL pattern on it is one of those 3D optical illusions that jump off the page.

“Well?” says Eddie, interrupting their joint meditation to gesture at Richie’s crotch, “Take your pants off. Put it on.”

Then he starts pulling at the thin toilet seat covers from the dispenser next to him. He folds them up and sets them, layered at least five sheets deep, on top of the bathroom tile.

“This floor is probably disgusting,” he grumbles. He gingerly settles his knees onto the layered paper.

With everything else happening, Richie kind of forgot how hard he is. But Eddie tips up his chin and looks at Richie from below with his vast entreating eyes, and it all comes rearing back.

Richie drops his pants in one swoop and his dick pretty much springs out like a jack-in-a-box. Dick-in-a-box, except _fuck_ Andy Samberg, what an asshole, he beat Richie out for that Hotel Transylvania part and he had the gall to email Richie and gloat about it afterwards.

Eddie puts one hand around the middle of the shaft and bats at it a little.

“Ow,” says Richie. 

“Sorry,” Eddie says, and then he hoovers it into his mouth. _One-in-hole,_ Richie thinks, and then he can’t really think anymore.

“Is she as good as you are at sucking cock?” Richie groans. He says “cock” instead of “dick” specifically because of the way Eddie pulls off then, scraping his teeth a little on the underside of his frenulum. It’s gentler than that makes it sound, like a quick nip at the end of a tender kiss.

“No,” says Eddie, looking up at him, “I’m better.”

Richie can’t confirm this claim, and he hopes he never has to, but for what it’s worth, Eddie’s a prodigy. His perfect circle of a mouth moving over and over Richie’s dick, slender hands pumping at the part that he hasn’t swallowed down, tongue doing this demonic swirling thing whenever it reaches the head. He’s making little gulping noises each time he unhitches and sinks back on, and sometimes he even laps at the sides with the wiggly point of his tongue. Richie himself is feeling wet and warm and wonderful, velvet aboveground that’s softer and squelchier than apple pie, than the pedestrian sheath of his own left hand.

Richie’s got one hand sort of petting the top of Eddie’s head — for balance, mostly. He tugs a lock accidentally. Eddie moans with his mouth full at that, which creates this very cool buzzing sensation that Richie and his dick are both very big fans of. He grasps more of his shiny hair and tugs harder and the noise this time is a throaty sigh that lances up to Richie’s balls, which are conveniently being fondled — really, that’s the only word for it — by Eddie’s right hand. He takes a look down at Eddie’s shuttered eyes, his eyelashes dusting his cheeks, the rose petal shape of his lips, the spit pooling around their edges, his shellacked hair coming undone under Richie’s grimy fingernails, and Richie groans from behind his tonsils, “Oh my god, I think I’m going to-”

Eddie heads off again at that, right before the good part, and it takes Richie by such surprise that he’s pretty sure the cum cha-cha slide reverses back into his body. “Wha?” he says.

Eddie looking off to the side, at the toilet paper roll, and he’s jacking Richie’s dick so fast that he’s probably going to get rug burn. Oh wait. Rod burn.

“Come, Richie,” he says. He’s blowing a strand of hair off his face and Richie’s staring at his Roman senator side profile and he’s shake-weighting with river-rapid intention over Richie’s hard dick.

“Okay,” Richie says, and it’s mostly a moan. He comes.

He kind of wipes for a little bit after that but he’d grabbed onto the tops of the stall walls beforehand, and his knees miraculously don’t buckle. He feels Eddie lock his hands into the backs of Richie’s knees, which he registers as rather thoughtful and supportive. He doesn’t think Eddie would have let him just fall into the toilet bowl, if only in the interest of overall cleanliness. 

The man in question is standing up now, wiping down the bottom half of his pants with a wad of toilet paper. Richie can see the bulge at the top of them where he’s straining under his belt.

“Uh,” he says, as his brain churns back online, “Need some help with that?”

Eddie twists up the corner of his mouth and says, “Do you have another condom?”

“No?” says Richie.

“You’re cruising for sex with two dicks involved and you only bring one condom?”

“Yeah, I guess!” exclaims Richie, two steps from frenzied. “Why don’t you have a condom? That’s a double standard, don’t you think?”

“Well, I wasn’t planning on having sex in a men’s bathroom today!” Eddie shout-whispers, matching him in pitch. They both freeze. You could hear a pin drop. Oh fucking hell, they better not hear a pin, a footstep, a goddamn worm scoot its way across the floor.

There’s nothing. Richie exhales. This is a family establishment, after all.

Richie slips the condom of his dick, ties it off, and drops it on the ground. Eddie wrinkles his nose at that and opens his mouth, probably to object, but then Richie’s peeling off his jacket and his t-shirt hurriedly and he doesn’t hear what happens to the incipient protest. “Here, you can just come on me,” he says.

“Oh god,” says Eddie.

Now Richie’s boxing him in, pressing him up close, with his arms crossed around Eddie’s trim back and his chest hair tickling the buttons on his neatly ironed jacket. “God,” says Eddie again, at breathing distance from the crook of Richie’s neck. Richie would pin him into the corner of the stall, put something hard against his back, but he doesn’t think Eddie would appreciate that, so he tries to rely on packing him in close, cramming one leg in between two of his, seizing hard at the places where they touch.

Richie helps him undo his belt buckle and the fly of his pants and finally, finally, there’s Eddie’s shiny red service weapon, skin taut and leaking. “Fuck,” hisses Richie, “everything about you is so hot.”

“Hurry up and make me come before someone walks in,” Eddie hisses back. The two of them a pair of very horny rattlesnakes. “Or did you want to end up like George Michael?”

“Can I kiss you?” Richie asks. 

“My mouth was just on, well, you know,” he whispers, but he’s tilted his chin up and his neck is straining ever-so-casually toward Richie’s face.

“Yeah,” Richie says, and he might be swooning.

When their lips touch, it’s softer than Richie intended. Eddie’s matching the shape of Richie’s mouth meticulously and the first press is almost delicate before he’s dropping his bottom lip open and anteater-biting Richie’s tongue into his mouth. Then _his_ tongue is twisting around next to Richie’s and swirling in Richie’s cheek in the same figure-eight motion it performed on his dick. Ten out of ten. Watch out, Kristy Yamaguchi, you’ve got competition.

Richie gets his hand around Eddie’s cock and jerks it, slower than Eddie did his, because he can’t really get up to Sonic speed with how close they are to each other, but he’s rubbing it against his stomach too, and he hopes the extra friction makes up for it. Eddie’s dick is so wet and sticky with pre-come, and Richie can feel it gumming up already all over his skin. Eddie’s probably going to make him take a whore’s bath after this, even though Richie would absolutely thrill at the prospect of driving all the way home with his shirt still soaked through and drying crusty from the gossamer evidence of real-live-boy-spunk. 

Eddie’s tongue is still in his mouth, growing more and more insistent, even as he starts to waver in Richie’s arms. He tastes sweet, like sugary soda, like licking vanilla ice cream off the cone, like pinkies brushing when you both reach for the M&M-Sno-Cap-popcorn at the matinee screening of the Last Crusade and you both flinch back reflexively but when you put your hand back in your lap you keep the pinky stuck out, careful not to let it touch the plastic armrest or the denim jacket you’ve laid diligently over your lap. Later you turn to check while Indy’s drinking from the grail and he’s not looking at you but the light from the theater screen is reflecting back onto the side of his face and you think you can watch the movie play out right there, on the smooth surface of his cheek, and you lift the hand with your own divine artifact up to your mouth and you stick it in there, quick, just to taste.

Where’d that come from? Richie’s never seen an Indiana Jones movie.

Eddie mumbles something into Richie’s mouth, and he starts to arch his torso backwards so that his dick is the only Eiffel Tower beam connecting their surging stomachs. Richie separates their mouths with a smack but he keeps his hand cradled under the frame of Eddie’s jaw so that they don’t really have to part.

He squeezes Eddie’s dick harder. “Yeah,” he purrs, “Come all over me, Eds. Fuck me up.”

Eddie does. Richie watches, transfixed, as it glazes all over his midsection. Sprinkler system. Icing bag. The plasma grenade explosions in Halo.

Eddie’s slumped down considerably, so now it’s Richie’s turn to hold him up. He clamps him by the small of his back and from underneath his left armpit, and bends over to kiss him briefly on the crown of his head as Eddie takes in ragged breaths.

They stand like that for a couple minutes, holding on, until Eddie has an adorable sort of muscle spasm, and then he extracts himself and steps back. His authoritarian eyebrows set in an angry line and pointed straight at Richie.

“Okay, we need to clean up before someone really comes in,” he says. He’s holding his softening dick delicately in one hand and pawing at the toilet paper roll with the other. He rips off an extremely lengthy piece of it and wads it up. He wipes down his own dick first. Then he steps in close and starts blotting at the cum lines laid out over Richie’s ribcage.

“You should wash this properly,” he mutters, “Actually, hang on. Stay here. I’ll get some paper towels.”

Eddie tucks his dick back into his underwear. Richie notices the sexy black fabric under his open fly for the first time and sighs wistfully as Eddie covers it back up.

Eddie’s smoothing his hands over his clothes, which are undeniably wrinkled but probably not too noticeable from a distance. Miraculously, there’s only one stain, on the left side of his shirt, and he can hide it completely with the side of his suit jacket. Well, a miracle courtesy of Richie, taking on all that friendly fire.

Eddie flips his lapel back into place and levels Richie with another stern teacher look, though it melts around the edges once Richie’s filling his full field of vision, undoubtedly debauched and besotted. Richie knows how he looks after these things. It’s something he’s working on; how to not confuse touch for affection, intimacy for respect.

“Um,” says Eddie, “Good. Thanks.”

Richie barks a laugh. “Good? As in, good game? Yeah, good game to you too.”

“I’m married,” says Eddie, and Richie could accurately say that he watches Eddie’s brow break out in a cold sweat.

“You mentioned,” says Richie, “Mazel tov.”

“I -” Eddie starts. His jaw is seizing up and his eyes are getting squirrelly and panicked. He’s sucking in a deep breath with his mouth. Richie wants to hug him.

“Hey, hey, chill, you think you’re the first married guy who’s sucked me off?” he says instead, shaping his tone into an approximation of soothing, “It’s no big deal. Plus, didn’t we establish you get a pass here?”

“You need to get better standards,” Eddie bites back.

“You do too, it seems like,” Richie says. He runs his palm over the smear of jizz that Eddie didn’t get to. He holds up the jizz hand and he pastes on a wide grin before wiping it sloppily onto his shorts. Eddie makes a “blech” face. It’s slightly unattractive, which is what Richie needed.

“It’s cool, Eddie. You’ll go back to your wife and your life until you get caught sucking off one too many guys in public restrooms. Then you’ll get a nice, pre-packaged divorce from a boutique midtown law firm and have to pay alimony until the end of time,” he claps his hands together, “It’s a very classic, three-act structure.”

Eddie just looks at him for a while, mouth set hard and determined. He’s gearing up for something, a big rock to pitch at Richie’s head. Richie doesn’t really want to get thunked by it. “I’m here until Monday,” he says at last, “We have an LA office. They’ve been trying to expand their headcount, preferably through transfer so they don’t have to train anyone. Kind of an open-ended question on this trip, whether anyone on my team would be interested.”

Richie freezes. There’s a strange flutter low in his gut. He’s not sure what this is. A peace offering? A proposition? “Are you saying -” Richie begins. He shakes his head to clear it. “Are you interested?”

Eddie shrugs. He crosses his arms. “Maybe,” he says, “I didn’t have a reason to be before.”

*

It’s unusually warm for the next three days, a smoggy late-breaking winter heat wave. On Tuesday, the sea breeze wafts back in and Richie finds a folded-up mini golf scorecard in the left pocket of his windbreaker. There’s a phone number he doesn't remember asking for scrawled in fading pencil on the back. He rubs his thumb over it. The graphite smears.

He never does get around to calling.

**Author's Note:**

> here's my IT (idiotic & terrible) [twitter](https://twitter.com/reconvenings)


End file.
